…For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL

“Beyond The Bubble” May Have A Lot Of Potential — Or Not

Beyond The Bubble is a project of Stanford and the Library of Congress that I just learned about from Gail Desler. It has a small collection of very good assessments that can be used in teaching history that you can print out and use with students, along with a rubric and student sample responses. You can register for it, but, though I might be missing something, I didn’t see any benefit to registration — it appears the same resources are available whether you log-in or not.

As it is now, it’s nice place to keep in mind for a few assessments that might work for a few units history educators might be teaching. It’s more important value, though, is as a model for simple assessments that teachers can create for their own classes that are directly connected to the content they’re teaching. However, it seems to me that if Beyond The Bubble really wants to have a substantial impact on teaching history in the U.S. and in the world (and even in other subjects as well), it will need to create a tool including a template/guide for teachers to be able to access the Library of Congress materials and create their own assessments that they can use and share on the site — as well as being able to be evaluated by other users.

Perhaps they have something like that in mind and that’s the reason why they are asking for registrations now, but I couldn’t see any info indicating those plans (perhaps I just missed it?).

So that’s the reason for the title of this post: Beyond The Bubble may have a lot potential — or not….

My Second Book On Student Motivation!

My Second Book On Teaching ELLs

My book, "The ESL/ELL Teacher's Survival Guide: Ready-to-Use Strategies, Tools, and Activities for Teaching English Language Learners of All Levels," (co-authored by Katie Hull Sypnieski) was published in the Summer of 2012